The art of voice: The voice of art - understanding children's graphicnarrative- enactive communication

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how visual thinking and graphic representation constitute important and perhaps primary vehicles of understanding and communicating. Because art involves thinking in symbols, it is a significant conduit for the embodiment of thoughts and emotions and the surfacing of imaginative, expressive and creative capabilities. Using an analytical framework that features three modes - graphic, narrative and enactive - several examples of children's work illustrate how drawing, talk and movement are parallel and mutually transformative processes. The textual features inherent in these multimodal representations are similar to that of film and theatre, involving: characters; obje..